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Rosie Campbell

Professor of Politics

Rosie Campbell joined Birkbeck in 2003 and is a Professor of Politics. She has recently written on what voters want from their parliamentary candidates, attitudes to MPs’ roles, the politics of diversity and gender and voting behaviour. She is the principle investigator of the ESRC funded Representative Audit of Britain, which surveyed all candidates standing in the 2015 and 2017 British General Elections, co-investigator of a Leverhulme funded study of British parliamentary candidates and MPs from 1945-2015 www.parliamentarycandidates.org and co-investigator of the Danish Council for Independent funded ‘Personalisation of politics among members of Parliament’project with principal investigator Helene Helboe Pedersen (Aarhus) and co-investigator Jennifer Hudson (UCL). Rosie has been recently interviewed by the Today Programme, Westminister Hour, Woman’s Hour, Newsnight and Good Morning Britain.

Research interests

The Representative Audit of Britain

The Representative Audit of Britain brings research on British parliamentary candidates together under one umbrella combining the British Representation Study and the Comparative Candidate Study. We conducted a comprehensive survey of candidates standing in the 2015 and 2017 British general elections, gathering data on their attitudes, backgrounds and experiences. The research team are working with the British Election Study to ensure that the data can be used to make elite/mass comparisons. The candidate information can also be combined with constituency data and social indicators generated from census data. The dataset is a powerful tool for analysing who gets selected and who gets elected.

Our motivation for this project emerges from a widely held belief among the British public that the political class—the parties and politicians who represent us—are in increasingly out of touch, insular and unable to understand the lives and concerns of the ordinary British citizen. Some recent evidence suggests that politicians are increasingly drawn from a narrowing middle class—a privileged class—despite significant efforts at increasing the descriptive representation of elected representatives. We want to know, is it true? How has the political class changed over time, if at all?

Campbell, Rosie, and Sarah Childs. 2010. "Apathetic, parochial, conservative? Women and elite/mass politics 1979 to present." in What Difference did the Vote Make: Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the 20th Century, edited by Esther Breitenbach and Pat Thane. London: Continuum.

Campbell, Rosie, and Sarah Childs. 2010. "Wags’, ‘Wives’ and ‘Mothers’… But what about Women Politicians? ." in The UK Votes: The 2010 General Election, edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathon Tonge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.